This is the second post in my series on getting your site indexed in search engines and search engine optimization.

Google is by far the most important search engine today. I've read reports that Google counts for about 60% of searches, but my experience says this is an underestimated number. For instance, one of my blogs was #1 for a reasonably competitive keyword on MSN and on page 1 in Yahoo! for that keyword. OK, that brought a nice number of visitors to my site. Then, for some unknown reason, my blog was dropped from both search engines, and I had practically zero traffic. Lucky for me (and thanks to some cunning promotion tactics and fancy footwork), Google finally found the page and gave it a decent PageRank, and even though my site wasn't ranked high for those competitive keywords anymore, just the niche traffic from Google for some very specific keyword combinations produced three times the traffic compared to MSN and Yahoo! combined.

While getting your blog noticed by any search engine is good, the bottom line is that it's vital that your blog is indexed by Google. The good news is, there is a way to get your blog indexed in Google, guaranteed.

It's called Google Sitemaps. Part of Google's Webmaster services, Google Sitemaps enables you to tell the Google search engine about the existence of your blog/website, and helps Google make a complete index of your pages and blog entries.

Let's go ahead and install Google Sitemaps for our Wordpress blog.

First, go to the Google Sitemaps home page, and open an account. It's free. Once you've done that, go My Sites -> Add Site. Type in the complete URL of your site and hit Enter. Now, go back to My Sites and you'll see your site has appeared. Towards the right you'll see a link that says Verify. Click this. Next, you get to choose whether to upload an HTML file to your server or use a META tag to verify your site. If you have access to your server root, you can upload the HTML file, but if you're using a hosted blog, you may not have such access. In that case, select the META tag option. Let's select that option now. You'll see a META tag box, just select the whole text and copy it to the clipboard. Now, go to your Wordpress theme editor (or corresponding template editor in other software), and select the header.php

Paste the META tag code so that your code will look like this (You can always check my current code in the Pages box on the right):

Hit Update File. Go back to Google Sitemaps and click the Verify button. When you next navigate to My Sites, you should see a green check in the Site Verified? column.

That's step one.

Next, we need the sitemap itself. For this, we turn to the amazing Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress v2. Click on download, select the version that suits you (English or International) and make sure you read the instructions thoroughly. Now, upload the .zip file to your server - follow the instructions on the plugin home page - and to your plugins folder. Unzip the file, go to the Wordpress dashboard, navigate to Plugins, activate the Sitemap plugin, go to Options -> Sitemap and click Rebuild Sitemap.

Now, go back to Google Sitemaps, click the Add a Sitemap link, select General Web Sitemap, type in your sitemap URL. It's probably http://yourblogname.com/sitemap.xml. In my case, it's http://innerblogger.com/sitemap.xml

Congratulations - your whole site is indexed in Google!